Financial Awareness of Young Adults - Experience From A Cross-Border Survey Among Hungarian Speaking Students

In this paper we highlight the main characteristics of the financial knowledge, behavior and attitude as well as the overall financial awareness of first-year college students of business and economic studies in 2021. We use the widely recognized methodology to carry out a survey, followed by a comparative analysis of the Hungarian students of a Hungary-based university and the ethnic Hungarian students of a university based outside Hungary. Our conclusion is that the financial awareness of the students of both universities exceeds the financial awareness of their respective population. We also process the findings of our survey in a variance analysis to show whether the gender or the location of the students is a determining factor in the level of their financial knowledge, behavior and attitude as well as their general financial awareness. We find that the financial knowledge and the financial awareness of the students of the two universities are not significantly different. We show that there is significant difference between students across gender lines: while male students display a higher average score for financial knowledge, female students exhibit a higher average score for financial attitude. Our findings reinforce the results of previous research projects in this topic.